Disruptive ChildhoodNature Research Methodologies in Changing Climates and Curriculums

• In Event: Roundtable Session 8
  In Roundtable Session: ChildhoodNature Public Scholarship: Disrupting Theory, Methodology, Relationships, and Pedagogies

Abstract

This presentation deeply considers and disrupts ChildhoodNature research methodologies through the guise of a large-scale Australian climate change education research project where a child-framed research methodology was applied. As it stands, climate change is absent within the Australian curriculum for children under 14. The Australian curriculum utilises watered-down language such as ‘environmental change’ instead of well-recognised and accepted terminology in climate change science (Whitehouse, 2013). The curriculum in many respects is blindly stuck in the Holocene past. Such revelations support Kagawa and Selby’s (2009, p.242) work contending that ‘climate change is too urgent and important to suffer 'death by formal curriculum'… calling for emergent curriculum approaches that embed climate change learning and action within community contexts’.

This paper is drawn from the findings of a NSW Environmental Trust grant entitled Climate Change + Me (see http://climatechangeandme.com.au). The first stage of the project involved a 1.5 year participatory youth-led research study which deeply considers children and young people’s (9-14 years) beliefs and concerns about climate change. The research methodology was child-framed in nature and combined visual ethnography with arts-based research approaches (Barratt Hacking, Cutter-Mackenzie, & Barrratt, 2013). The study has also placed considerable emphasis on the public impact of the children’s research through an interactive exhibition which travelled across the region. In this presentation we extend our co-researchers’ voices drawing upon their narratives and images, in turn disrupting public notions of childhood, nature and curriculum.

Authors

• Amy N. Cutter-Mackenzie, Southern Cross University

• David Rousell, Southern Cross University